Vulnerability Remediation: A Fast-Track Guide

What is vulnerability remediation? 

Vulnerability remediation is the process of fixing, mitigating, or eliminating security vulnerabilities that have been identified within your environment, before attackers can exploit them. Aimed at protecting data and systems, it’s one of the critical aspects of vulnerability management. Vulnerability remediation is similar to fixing faulty doors and windows in your home—left unrepaired, they can be exploited by adversaries to access your home or steal your valuables.

Common vulnerability remediation procedures include fixing misconfigurations, resolving coding flaws, applying patches, and implementing compensating controls where vulnerabilities can’t be fixed.

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The importance of fast and effective vulnerability remediation

Picture what the 2024 zero-day ransomware attack on Rackspace—where attackers stole customers’ monitoring data and forced Rackspace to shut down its monitoring dashboards—would look like for your organization. While the exact cost of the attack isn’t public knowledge, a previous ransomware attack in 2022 cost Rackspace an epic $10 million in annual revenue.

Clearly, this isn’t something you’d want—and fixing vulnerabilities fast and effectively is the surest way to avoid it.

In the past, attackers exploited vulnerabilities weeks or months after they’d been discovered, but Wiz now puts the mean time to exploit (MTTE) at 8 hours after an exposure occurs. That’s why prompt and effective vulnerability remediation boils down to cutting mean time to resolution (MTTR), to deter attackers from stealing sensitive data or disrupting business functions.

Then, there’s the fact that timely vulnerability resolution helps enterprises stay compliant with—and avoid hefty compliance violation fines from—regulatory bodies like GDPR, HIPAA, DORA, and PCI DSS. 

Vulnerability remediation vs. vulnerability management

Vulnerability remediation is system-based issue resolution. Vulnerability management, on the other hand, is the ongoing process of discovering, assessing, mitigating, and monitoring security weaknesses. 

Vulnerability remediation vs. patching

Vulnerability remediation involves addressing security risks and can be done via multiple options, including patching. Patching involves applying updates to resolve security vulnerabilities and performance issues. 

The takeaways from these comparisons? Vulnerability remediation and patching are two pillars of vulnerability management. And the bottom line of vulnerability management is vulnerability remediation.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s walk through the vulnerability remediation workflow, challenges, best practices, and tools. In this step-by-step guide, we’ll also zero in on how vulnerability remediation works in the cloud and unpack strategies for fixing cloud-specific vulnerabilities.

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The vulnerability remediation workflow

Let’s break down the vulnerability remediation workflow, step-by-step:

Step 1: Scanning/discovery

The first step is to conduct system-wide vulnerability scans and assessments, which requires vulnerability scanners and application security testing tools, respectively.

Vulnerability scanners automatically uncover known vulnerabilities like out-of-date software, misconfigurations (e.g., open ports and exposed storage buckets), and excessive permissions. Application security testing tools pinpoint design weaknesses, such as source code vulnerabilities, coding flaws, and runtime risks. 

Step 2: Prioritizing remediation efforts 

Once vulnerabilities are found, risk prioritization—classifying the vulnerabilities by severity, context, potential business impact, and likelihood of exploitation—comes next.

Prioritization is vital. Consider this: In 2024 alone, 40,000+ vulnerabilities were published by the CVE program. There’s no way to resolve them all in a year. But it’s possible to fix the most critical, thanks to risk-based vulnerability prioritization.

Basically, vulnerability prioritization aligns risk remediation efforts with business goals, ensuring teams resolve the most critical vulnerabilities first. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Vulnerability prioritization can be extremely challenging, in fact, because incorrect rankings can result in teams ignoring the most critical risks. 

To make sure you’re getting your prioritization right, use vulnerability prioritization frameworks like the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) and Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS). Or better still, leverage tools that automate vulnerability prioritization using business context.

Step 3: Addressing vulnerabilities

Addressing security risks involves patching, updating, reconfiguring, blocking, or deleting components. For example, to fix a container image vulnerability, you may need to update the base image or delete all unused libraries harboring vulnerabilities.

When fixing vulnerabilities, make it a point to ensure fixes are applied with minimal to no impact on business operations. Also, choose effective remediation options. If issues are popping back up after patching, for example, then a deeper problem may need to be fixed. 

Step 4: Validating fixes

Verify that vulnerabilities have been resolved by re-scanning affected components. You should also use penetration testing tools to simulate attacker TTPs and find unresolved vulnerabilities. 

Step 5: Monitoring and threat hunting

Continuously monitor and hunt for new vulnerabilities. Integrate automated monitoring tools, vulnerability scanners, and application security testing tools into all system and network components, including IDE and CI pipelines. The perk of shifting security left this way? You get to resolve major security issues ahead of software deployment—before fixes become expensive and time-consuming. 

Common vulnerability remediation challenges 

In 2024, the MTTR for critical vulnerabilities was pegged at 97 days, or roughly 3 months. No surprises there. Most organizations face hurdles remediating vulnerabilities. The top challenges are:

• Poor visibility: Enterprises juggle various tools, libraries, and software versions. Once configured, they might introduce toxic combinations into external-facing applications, runtime environments, and other system components. Without proper contextualization to visualize exactly how these resources relate, security teams struggle to find potential attack paths and vulnerabilities. Plus, enterprises often have to adopt measures like custom security patches and backporting. While these measures fix critical bugs, they make visibility into vulnerable components a hassle.

• Noisy alerts: Faced with numerous alerts, often containing lots of false positives and negatives, security teams end up expending scarce resources investigating false alerts instead of resolving actual vulnerabilities.

• Prioritization challenges: Knowing what vulnerabilities to prioritize can be daunting. Frameworks like CVSS and EPSS do help, but enterprises’ unique risks must also be considered—and this is where context-sensitive vulnerability scanners outshine others.

• Availability of patches and fixes: Often, vendors and researchers pre-disclose vulnerabilities before patches are released, with the intent of alerting security teams. The downside? This gives hackers a head start while teams scramble to catch up. Wiz recommends a safer alternative: Vendors should announce vulnerabilities and upcoming patches without sharing the full details so hackers can’t exploit them beforehand.

• Business disruption: When remediation requires removing entire components or applying disruptive fixes, getting backing from the C-suite and cross-team collaboration can be a showstopper. Still, when fixes require some downtime that may translate to short-term losses, in the long-run, they’re more cost effective than risking an attack. (Remember: Hotpatching is a viable alternative if downtime isn’t an option.)

• Legacy software weaknesses: Legacy systems may not support the software updates required to fix vulnerabilities. Organizations may have to resort to compensating controls (which aren't foolproof), complicated workarounds (which may obscure other vulnerabilities), or if the risk level is low, leaving the vulnerability unpatched.

• Zero-day exploits: Some vulnerabilities don’t get discovered until they’re exploited. To stay proactive, actively hunt for threats using threat hunting tools and threat intelligence data.

Best practices for vulnerability remediation

We’ve covered the day-to-day challenges of prompt vulnerability remediation. Now, let’s check out some best practices to help you handle the challenges like a pro:

• Implement vulnerability management best practices: Vulnerability remediation shouldn’t be done in isolation. Integrate it into your vulnerability management program and adopt vulnerability management best practices like continuous monitoring, proactive threat hunting, secure software design, and vulnerability lifecycle management. Also, invest in the right vulnerability management tool to get complete visibility into your stack and uncover hidden risks that only proper contextualization can expose.

• Adopt risk-based remediation: Focus on the vulnerabilities most likely to be exploited or to cause you the highest damage if exploited. Also, note that this can change over time: A low-risk vulnerability can become high-risk if an attack path suddenly opens up in your stack or a new exploit gets discovered.

• Create service-level objectives: Define remediation timeframes, goals, and stakeholders responsible for achieving said timelines. For example, you can specify that critical vulnerabilities be resolved in 24 hours and hold security or SOC team leads responsible.

• Leverage powerful automation tools: Automating discovery, prioritization, and remediation using AI-powered tools reduces false positives and error margins. Automated remediation tools contain attack blast radii and offer remediation guidelines that speed up issue resolution.

• Develop incident response plans: Incident response plans help ensure seamless cross-team collaboration in the midst of the chaos that typically follows an attack, fast-tracking containment and minimizing the potential damage. Incident response templates are critical here.

• Manage legacy systems effectively: As legacy systems are often patch-resistant, you can apply workarounds like backported patches or custom security patches. But version control is key because it offers code-level visibility and facilitates easy rollbacks if changes fail.

• Integrate threat intelligence platforms: Threat intelligence platforms provide timely information about potential attacks, vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild, and supply chain risks to watch out for, enabling time-sensitive risk prioritization.

• Assess vulnerability remediation success: Measure the efficacy of your methods by assessing the percentage of critical vulnerabilities over time. Check that no resolved vulnerabilities are reappearing, and use metrics like mean time to remediate (MTTR) to gauge remediation speed and effectiveness.

Strategies for vulnerability remediation in the cloud

Even though vulnerability remediation is generally challenging, cloud-specific risks like misconfigured containers and excessive permissions make discovering and remediating vulnerabilities in the cloud more cumbersome. But there’s no need to stress; with the strategies below, you’ve got cloud vulnerability remediation under control. 

Use CNAPPs to continuously monitor and discover risks 

Cloud native application protection platforms (CNAPPs) continuously track cloud environments, data, and workloads to detect vulnerabilities in real time. As consolidated platforms, they offer a range of interconnected tools including CSPM, DSPM, CIEM, and CWPP for comprehensive cloud security.

For example, the CSPM component of CNAPPs alerts you to misconfigurations, unsecured APIs, and other cloud risks, while their DSPM component lets you know when cloud misconfigurations are putting data at risk or when encryption is poorly implemented.

Understand that context is king in the cloud 

In the cloud, vulnerabilities rarely stand alone. A publicly exposed VM may not seem like such a big deal until you realize it’s connected to a storage bucket with sensitive data, and the storage bucket has an over-permissioned identity. So, begin vulnerability remediation by knowing how various cloud assets and risks interconnect.

Enforce POLP

Over-provisioned access is one of the most common cloud misconfigurations, and it’s a leading cause of privilege escalation and lateral movement to sensitive assets. Resolve over-provisioned identity risks by adopting the principle of least privilege (POLP). POLP ensures no entity has more permissions than they need to complete their tasks. 

Ensure proper secrets management

Secrets are the gateway to sensitive data and cloud infrastructure. If leaked, they can be used to wreak havoc. Use secrets scanners to continuously uncover leaked secrets, which you can then revoke, disable, or replace.

Leverage tools that provide code-to-cloud visibility and remediation

Use tools that seamlessly connect cloud resources to CI pipelines and code repos. The ideal tool should pinpoint code flaws at the root of various cloud risks and offer in-code remediation suggestions to help teams fix issues instantly and effectively.

Common tools and frameworks for vulnerability remediation

We’ve mentioned a number of tools and frameworks. Here’s a roundup that explains how they drive vulnerability remediation.

Tools

How Wiz simplifies vulnerability remediation

As we've seen, vulnerability remediation is a complex mix of processes. But it doesn’t have to be a headache! Wiz streamlines the entire remediation process for you with a variety of tools such as:

• Wiz Vulnerability Scanner: Wiz keeps you on top of vulnerabilities 24/7. A new vulnerability just hit the news? You can be sure our vulnerability database is immediately updated to help you find the vulnerability wherever it may be hiding in your stack.

• Wiz Security Graph: That hassle you face finding buried vulnerabilities? Say goodbye to it with Wiz Security Graph’s attack path visualization, which helps you discover toxic combinations and contextualize cloud risks seamlessly.

• Prioritization with Wiz: Wiz incorporates business context, CVSS and EPSS scores, and threat intel to accurately rank vulnerabilities. 

• Wiz’s acquisition of Dazz ASPM: With this acquisition, Wiz gives you unmatched cloud-to-code, code-to-cloud visibility and remediation, cutting MTTR massively.

• Vulnerability reporting: The old way of reporting vulnerabilities only on communication channels? Wiz is beyond that. Get vulnerability reports right where you’re working with in-code, step-by-step remediation guidance that developers and security teams can work with easily. 

• Cloud-first vulnerability remediation: Partnering with Amazon Bedrock, Wiz offers AI-driven remediation guidance for one-click vulnerability resolution.

Ready to turbocharge your vulnerability remediation efforts Wiz? Schedule a demo to get started.